Seniors Housing Business

FEB-MAR 2017

Seniors Housing Business is the magazine that helps you navigate the evolution of the seniors housing industry.

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52 www.seniorshousingbusiness.com Seniors Housing Business n February/March 2017 Community engagement is key While seniors housing proj- ects tend to be widely accepted, it remains essential for developers and operators to drum up sup- port when they first step foot in a community. Belmont Village Senior Living owns and operates the 24 com- munities that it developed. Three others are currently under devel- opment. Belmont Village prefers high barrier-to-entry locations where new development is not easy to get off the ground. Ready to meet that challenge, Chapman and his team enter each community poised to tailor their approach to support a neighbor- hood's unique identity. In Albany, Calif., Belmont is under construc- tion with Belmont Village Albany on land that was ground leased from the University of Califor- nia Berkeley. The project is a col- laboration with Cal Berkeley that ultimately received unanimous approval from the Albany City Council. The university and city had been working for several years to entitle and redevelop the tract of land before Belmont took the lead, so the community wanted to be intimately involved in driving the development. Belmont hosted several com- munity meetings with high turn- out. Chapman says there was a tremendous push from citizens about green initiatives. "They were particularly insis- tent about solar energy, so we agreed to add some solar," he says. "We did that specifically because there was a strong inter- est from the community's neigh- bors." Belmont Village started working on the design in January 2013 and plans to open Belmont Village Albany this August. Belmont also had to come up with some atypical solutions to win over residents of West Lake Hills, Texas, a small city about five miles from Austin with a population of approximately 3,300, according to the U.S. Cen- Big Rock Partners is building Windsor at Celebration, a master-planned community located at the gates of Walt Disney World in Celebration, Fla. The community will include 152 independent living units, 55 assisted living and 33 memory care units. It is an example of large planned community that neglected to include seniors housing in the original plans.

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